I’m sure everyone has these, but occasionally I’ll have a dream that is especially vivid. So vivid, in fact, that the memory will haunt me until I write it down as a story or a snippet of one. Sometimes these dreams are insanely complex storylines with a detailed backstory that just flowers out of my subconscious fully-formed. Sometimes they are just scenes, or single images. But in every case, they are in vivid color, and they stick with me for days…weeks, even, until they get written down.
Another common theme is that they always, ALWAYS seem to be extremely outre, fantastic, and mythological. They always have to do with demons, ghosts, religion, horrific murders, gods, witches, etc. They are usually quite dark and disturbing as well.
Now, I normally have, well, normal, dreams. These things happen quite seldom…on the order of once or twice a year, maybe.
One of the “storyline” dreams dealt with my role as a witch-hunter in some fictional world. There was an instantly-detailed backstory and magical system that sprang from whole cloth out of my head, and the whole thing revolved around my using the flayed skins of already-executed witches to track down others by a system of sympathetic magic. Very dark. In the dream, we were hunting a witch through a system of urban sewers or underground passages in a city, and came upon a staircase that led to the street level. We came out in a crowded pub, and everything instantly went silent. Someone said, “We were told that anything that came out of that passage should be destroyed, since we are good people.” In confusion, I looked around and saw the word “Brujeria” inscribed on the doorway above the stairs, and realized that I was the witch, as everyone in the pub menacingly advanced. I woke up.
Another had to do with a complicated murder of a young man’s wife by his supposed best friend, and the hauntings that accompanied it until the murderer was found. It included sreaming photographs, the spectre of the murdered woman in my bed, and other nasty delights. I’ll spare you the whole story since it’s very long.
Another was another dream in which I was an Inquisitor type that hunted demons with a silver knife. Whenever one died, it was as if the rest of the people around it forgot it ever existed. In one scene, I destroyed many of them in a single public place, and at the end, there were corpses everywhere, and blood pooling and running in rivers on the floor…and the human crowd was utterly unaware of it. They’d step in the blood, unconsciously step over corpses, laughing and joking, tracking bloody footprints everywhere. Very surreal, and yet very realistic.
Another was simply a scene of a tattoo. It combined the Kaballistic diagram with a cadeuceus, angel wings that wrapped around the body to cross tips across the chest, a World-Tree with roots below the beltline and the upper boughs spreading out across the back, with angels sitting in the branches, and many other elements.
I had another one last night. It was quite short. A vignette from Hell, I guess. I was there, pinned under mounds and mounds of corpses in various states of disrepair, and I could not move anything. I could twitch my head around a little, but it was as if my face was the only thing exposed to the outside. Suddenly, I became aware, by the feeling of shifting weight, of something crawling over the pile, just out of my sight, toward me. A sugary-sweet female voice began speaking, very close to my ear. Very horrible feeling.
She said, “You know, whe I first arrived here, I was terrified. I thought I’d be ripped, maimed, and mutilated constantly. But you know what happened instead? They just held me down and gently tapped on my forehead…for 40 years.”
Then it laughed, high and manic. I tried to squirm at this point, and the voice tsked me.
“I can see you’re going to be difficult to manage. So why don’t we just reach under here like so, and give those pesky cervical vertebrae a little twist…”
At this point I felt a cold hand sliding beside and under my neck, and just as it got a grip, I woke up.
Brrrrr…that was a nasty one. I’ve learned to rather enjoy these types of dreams when they come along, but this one I could have seriously done without.